Querencia
by CollinchWe
Summary: ... "But goddamn it, Cloud." Tifa pulls back her bangs, almost a bit too hard, breathes in deeply. "We've been scared so many times before. For one, I don't think I'm scared to die anymore. I mean, I've finally found the meaning in life I've been searching for, so no matter what people say, I'm contented..."


The church is one of the most abandoned places in Midgar. Not only does it no longer represent its true purpose, the heaps of rubble and all of the unwanted things infesting the surrounding compound bear much of the impudent nature of the people and how they just couldn't care. Cloud doesn't even want to get started on the interior, where the flowers have been stripped to their demise, the bed inundated with the healing waters which may soon lose its effectiveness like any other things that are impermanent on the Planet. It is a place left to crumble on its own, so nobody has to take responsibility for its denigration.

Nevertheless, a filtered light still pours through an opening that gapes like a colossal abomination above their heads makes an awkward distraction, if anything, and it is in fact hard to ignore the fleeting tranquility it provides.

Yet.

And yet…Tifa has taken it upon herself as soon as they arrived- for the place, for the death of a friend, for things lost to a memory. Cloud knows as she suddenly drops to her knees and cries like she did at the Forsaken or Forgotten City, whichever he doesn't care what the place is called. He doesn't just grab her by the shoulder this time, but embraces her back with face buried in her shoulder letting a tear or two escape, because it still aches in many places he can't yet identify. Now as they sit by the waters with feet soaked in, his mind continues to race, that he doesn't realize where he has been looking.

"Why are you staring at me like that?"

_Why you feisty for, _he wants to ask but thought the better of it. "Sorry, I've no idea."

She is exhausted, he can tell by those red puffs below her eyes and she is probably thinner than she has ever been in her life, and it is all his fault.

His eyes tear away from her face, his hand rubbing the scar next to his chest, because habit.

He doesn't need reasons. He can choose to not care if he wanted to. What is there left to remember? Some memories just fade without him noticing and sometimes they don't return at all. Rationality is irrelevant when your life is a convoluted mess.

"Cloud?"

He shudders, reveries in asunder.

"Are you giving up again?"

"On what?"

"_On _the conversation. In a time like this, _normally _people would speak what's on their minds. It's just you and me, just spill it - whatever it is you've been wanting to say."

Except that he is not normal. And he fears to say thoughts that may mirror her own. Thoughts that shouldn't be moulded into words for they are morbid and dark, and have hurt the humanity in them too many times before. Yet, she's taking the risk.

"-or wait, the church, flower girl kinda make sense…"

Deliberately or not, a flash of pink and a pair of green orbs appear before him.

_Planet's last maiden…_

_The Cetra…_

_His flower girl… _they said.

_You loved her, didn't you?_ That young Tifa had asked back then, when he hardly even knew who he was. And back then he did not answer, just walked away like how he used to run away from his problems.

Yet she takes the risk.

As always, Tifa likes to play with fire, as if it doesn't burn. He wonders if in her free time she would rear livid wisps in her palms that feed on her burning rage. Or maybe she herself is fire, of smokeless indigo flames, always haplessly melting icy cold surfaces mindless of whatever harm might emerge from beneath it. Too fast, she's burning it up. And his throat is hurting for some reason. And it is still _fucking _hard to look at her in the eyes.

A smirk cracks across his face, mildly annoyed at her bold disposition. "So what if you burn along, huh, Tifa." He blurts.

She curses under her soft breath before asking, "Cloud, whydid you bring me here for?"

"What? you were okay with it just a while ago." He groans.

"I was. But that's not what I'm asking. Why the hell did you bring me _here_?"

She is angry now, maybe. Tired and angry. His hands twitch slightly as fear nibbles at the tips of his fingers. The kind of fear that is stupid and irrelevant to the current situation he is in but lingers like a dark shadow at the back of his mind. The kind of fear that she'd finally realise she is not going to waste another second hanging around a wastrel like him - that she'd no longer care and find a life somewhere else without him. For most of the time, he tells himself no matter how much pain or sadness he feels, everything else precedes. Because what he feels doesn't matter. It never has.

"I don't know, Teef." He sighs, his hand running down his face. "I guess I'm still trying to find the courage to face certain things. I didn't necessarily think I have to say something. I'm...sorry."

_Not just weak but a liar too, Cloud Strife…_

Tifa just sighs beside him, the pain in her eyes manifesting once more. The heck is she suffering like this? "_Certain_ things... Does sitting here do anything? Are you waiting for her to pop out of nowhere or something?"

"What makes you_\- this _isn't about her-"

"-what is it, then?" Splitting paths, splayed limbs, and a shrill. He imagines a chaotic dawn as he looks at her.

"-you brought me here because you want to do something about it, right? Because for the longest time I thought it's about time you've finally acknowledged how you feel about things. You're having second thoughts now because you always think they aren't important, don't you? Well, that's bullshit."

"Tifa, I…"

He remembers a voice, as he had watched the flames destroyed his hometown, his house crumbling into ashes and... in the heavy rain, the one hand that had fended off the enemy all alone... slid down from his face to the ground soaked with blood. _He was alone… All alone..._

_There goes your pride, honor and dreams. You've failed. Failed everyone… especially you… _

Then everything else broke away. He became the monster like those in the rotting tanks after surviving being almost mangled to death. His mind corrupted and soul lost in twilight.

_I said that I'll live both of our lives…._

_I'm sorry, she's dead, dead. I let our Aerith die. I've failed… failed…_

_Please… give me a number…_

_Maybe, someday… I'll be the Cloud you want me to be…. Miss Tifa..._

To question his own existence is nothing new. Self-denial works like a pill that helps to make him numb so that all of the dark, ugly intangible memories can make sense. But today, he has somehow skipped it and with the numbness in his brain gone, he can even recall the last slice of pie he ate before he left Nibelheim for good. Shadow of his mother's back saying to him things he can't remember. The orange and pink sky of that small town. Tifa's silhouette as she lied on the bed, before he left Edge that dawn. The broken roads under his feet, the weight of the blade between his shoulders and the taste of metallic rain everywhere in Midgar. He doesn't recall hating all of them at all.

He shuts his eyes and sees red turns into grey and then white. _Just white like the first snow; just like a blank canvas; just like-_ and he opens his eyes. She's still there, beside him, staring. Hard. It makes him want to laugh.

Instead, he touches her face that feels numb in his hand, not caring how damaged it looks in contrast to her perfect white skin. And she lets him. And his eyes are starting to itch and burn.

"That's what you get for sticking around with an idiot," he snickers, cracking a wry grin. "You got me there, Tifa, but I'm not here to harp on it anymore.."

"But why-"

"-to prove a point, perhaps." He takes a side glance at her - a sudden rush of determination washes over him. "That I'm worthy. Still, after all these chaos. The fact that I feel the same way I did when I first crashed down from there, I want it to mean something," he tells her, nodding towards the gaping hole above their heads. "Aerith must have felt the same. Never once did she ever mention this place like she owned it but took care of it anyway. Then again, those bastards had no right to destroy it."

Tifa frowns beside him. "Worthy? Seems to me you're just validating..." Anxiously she turns to look at him directly in the eyes, as if penetrating his feeble mind. "Cloud. You're not him. You're not Sephiroth. You're many things that he's not. And I'll remind you that every second if you need me to."

He falls silent at that, as the same fear reels him in, reminding him of the darkness that might claw at him the moment he forgets who he is. The time when she might be looking at a mad man instead of a Cloud Strife.

"Isn't this what it's all about? To be who you are, no matter what - to remember to _be_. That you're always worthy to be yourself - even if you don't really like yourself that much," Tifa chuckles at the irony, "but it's a responsibility. I think it's a privilege that I can tell others that 'Cloud is just Cloud' and to have them to actually understand what that means - that you're _Cloudly_ annoying and stubborn and kind - that makes all the difference."

The shadow from a crippled column nearby creates lines on Tifa's face that make her look like a warrior princess. He figures her exasperation is gone now and is reminded of some strange character from a book he read of a woman royalty that ruled her kingdom in the mountains. In her world, people recover from their afflictions from just setting afoot in the mountains. But the book is gone, so has his childish hope of finding the kingdom, once.

_But we've been lucky, have we not, Cloud? _He recalls her saying every time the nightmares came about. Once he dreamt, he was reaching out for a girl with dark hair but his legs can't seem to close the distance no matter how fast or long he ran. And he couldn't call out to her as his tongue had been extracted by a mad scientist. He had woken up in the church with the stigma, screaming her name, choking out non-existent Mako he thought he was drowning in.

Sometimes he would dream of his mother and would wake up hopelessly bewildered how trivial his memories had made of his mother's death and why she was taken away from him to somewhere he could not reach. And he would sit there frozen till someone snaps him out of it, when there was even anyone.

All these struggles to be worthy of something, or even to oneself have definitely created a void or chasm that can't be filled with things that have been lost. He _knows _that.

But… putting things behind is easier said than done. To want to forget when all he does is remember, not that those nightmares help anyway. Life is so _fucking _constant with that.

_There ain't getting off this train, _he recalls again someone had said someone had said. Then there's Bugenhagen's admonition on the Planet's deciding when humanity's time is over. Maybe then, that's the only way they could get off. He can't yet decide whether that's a good thing or not.

"You know what I'm thinking of now? I'm thinking if that time comes when the old man's prophecy materialises, can we look for our boots in the dark, accepting and unafraid of all of it?" He asks without context, with certainty for Tifa's comprehension.

She chuckles after a moment, as a sign. "Maybe."

Maybe. Maybe like Zack. Like Aerith. Like mum. Who the heck knows if his father still lives.

Above them, beyond the filtered light, the stars are breathtakingly bright that it is almost hard to imagine that there were plates concealing them once. Back then when he was that 14-year old eager to leave his hometown, who had mustered all the guts he had to ask his girl crush next door out to the water tower, they had been staring at the same sky and brandishing a promise like it could change the world. Nowadays though, they would just look up to check for any visible cracks in the sky for an 's how youth easily slips away.

"But goddamn it, Cloud." Tifa pulls back her bangs, almost a bit too hard, breathes in deeply. "We've been scared so many times before. For one, I don't think I'm scared to die anymore. I mean, I've finally found the meaning in life I've been searching for, so no matter what people say, I'm contented. Yes, we have people we love but people die everyday and you just love them as much as you can - while you can. And for one," she suddenly flushed, "thanks for coming back. It's weird but I can never imagine life without you now- don't know what I'd do without you."

He smirks. "I know what; you'd go out looking for me, of course."

If there was a second time for them to spend in the lifestream for whatever reason - no matter how sad it may sound - he'd take it. Fate is forgiving and unforgiving at the same time and it dawns on him that it doesn't help feeling bad that theirs are so _goddamn _intertwined.

He is not sure if he is waiting for her to say anything as he catches her staring up at the night sky before closing her eyes. So he takes her hand and kisses it, and instead of drowning in Mako, he imagines big waves splashing on the sandy shore, sunlight spilling on his skin.

After a while, she opens her eyes. "You're going to stare at me like this all night?"

For the longest time, he finally acknowledges the happiness growing in him. He doesn't have a favourite colour or of other things. But… if anyone should ask, he does have one favourite girl he cannot stop thinking about his entire life.

If, anyone should ask. There's always something you can't move on from.

"Yeah," he replies unhesitantly, pulling her closer. "Something like that."


End file.
